The large samuran whirls around and lands Catch a stunning blow, ringed with a fiery orange glow, before he can react. My stomach drops into my feet as I see him go sailing back. Shrieks-loudly follows up his attack, running quickly towards where Catch has crumpled to the ground.
Even as I start healing him with the mana I’ve been feeding into his system in between fights, whenever I’m free – him and Bastet – I also send two more bone arrows at the Warrior in quick succession. With his attention focussed on the prone and unmoving samuran, he doesn’t notice the arrows flying at him this time.
Without the same accuracy which the Warrior had displayed with his initial salvo, I am unable to hit him anywhere particularly vulnerable. Still, two arrows hitting him in the back are enough to regain his attention once more and he whirls around.
Then I see the moment he decides that chasing after me, the ghost he can’t see, is less tactically sound than dealing with Catch, the samuran he can see. Urgency pressing me, I work hard on both fronts: healing Catch so he can defend himself, and dealing with Shrieks-loudly so he doesn’t have to.
Pouring magic into the venom within Shrieks-loudly, I find to my surprise that the magic is unintentionally going in two different directions. It figures that I’d manage to unconsciously work out how to multitask with mana in the middle of a battle.
I don’t waste time figuring out exactly how I’m succeeding, instead just focussing on doing it, while maintaining the highest level of meditation I can so that I replenish my mana as quickly as possible.
The spear flashes down, ringed with orange. At the last moment, Catch shifts away. I let out a breath of relief, but it’s not over yet. The spear stabs at him again and again, Shrieks-loudly’s whole body glowing faintly orange. The smaller samuran dodges him, avoiding being pinned like a butterfly on a board by a hair’s breadth most of the time. But he is avoiding it, somehow.
I know it won’t last, though.
Relaxing my focus on Catch’s body – his injuries not at all fully healed, but not too bad for now – I turn my attention to the bone arrows I shot at the Warrior. Touching the mana within them, I force them to grow spikes.
Shrieks-loudly hisses in pain, and tries to grab at them, but they’re behind his back and out of his reach. The spikes growing longer, sweat rolling down my forehead at the mental and magical strain of doing it, I breathe heavily in relief when he stiffens.
Abruptly, the Warrior’s lower legs collapse under him, sending him to the ground. He can still move his arms – and does, his spear flailing around him – but everywhere from mid-back downwards is abruptly out of his control. Piercing his spinal cord with a bone spike will do that.
Dropping Fade thankfully, I dry-heave for a moment, nausea abruptly the only thing in my mind. Overusing my magic is never pleasant.
Fortunately, my rate of replenishment is quick enough that I’m only suffering from the symptoms for a minute or so before they begin abating.
I walk towards the two samurans. Catch has pushed himself to his feet and is standing out of range of the Warrior’s long spear. I come to stand by his side.
“I’ve paralysed your lower half,” I tell the Warrior evenly. I hear a susurration around me as the watching samurans hear me. Shrieks-loudly looks up at me with horror glinting in his eyes – I’m not surprised. “I can heal it,” I tell him, “But only when this battle is concluded. Will you surrender?”
He looks up at me for a beat and then slowly lifts his chin in wordless sign of agreement.
With this victory, I’ve proved myself to be the strongest of the Warriors. I’ve won every fight I’ve been in and my Bound warriors have all surrendered the moment the Pathwalker started the fight. I thought the Pathwalkers might give up on setting us up against each other, but perhaps the structure of it all is important, even if the outcome is predetermined. Or perhaps it’s to do with the sigils – I only gained them once the others had officially surrendered.
There’s something else to consider now than just sigils. The thing is that the number of marks on the back of Shrieks-loudly here indicates that even if he’s not top lizard, he’s still going to be high in the rankings, and therefore have a lot of influence, especially on the other Warriors. I know that I’m going to need to use Dominate on the Pathwalkers for sure, but I decide to do it on the Warrior at my feet too. I think it’s worth the risk of over-extending myself later.
I admit that part of my reasoning is also that fixing a spinal injury is going to take a lot of concentration and mana as it is – it will work significantly better if he’s one of my Bound.
Shifting to the side so I can meet his eyes, I whisper the trigger word which sends us into the greyed out world of the Battle of Wills. The pressure here feels much like the pressure during the Battle with Lee. A bit stronger, perhaps, but not by a lot. I suspect if I had used Inspect on Shrieks-loudly shortly before triggering Dominate, it would have shown his effective Willpower to be below fifty.
Almost strolling forwards through the minimal resistance, I make my way towards the figure on the other side of the space. Shrieks-loudly watches me approach with impressive impassiveness. Even his emotions, when I get close enough to feel them, are calmer than most. Lee was fairly calm when I Dominated him too, but Shrieks-loudly beats him hands down.
I stop within an arm’s length of his motionless form.
“Do you sense what this is about?”
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I do, he rumbles, his emotions briefly flickering, before returning to their calm placidity.
“Do you have anything to say? Any questions? Any requests?” I offer him the chance to speak, probably more for my benefit than for his, based on how the other Warriors’ Battles went.
There’s silence for a few moments, but I sense an undercurrent of emotion shifting, so wait patiently for him to answer either way. The movements are too subtle for me to determine exactly what they are, but I can feel the ripple nonetheless.
What do you intend for my village? he asks after a long moment. I’m not entirely surprised by the question – and also not surprised that this is the samuran to ask it, of all the Warriors. After all, they only have to obey the commands from the Pathwalkers and the boss Warrior; Shrieks-loudly is the boss Warrior – or was, at least. Perhaps still is since I’m not exactly a ‘Warrior’ due to my use of magic.
It was his job to ask that kind of question, to be the balance against the Pathwalkers’ new initiatives and ideas. Personally, I think he probably should have asked that question a bit more when it was the shaman raising the idea of capturing Kalanthia’s cub, but perhaps he did and was convinced in some way. I might ask him later.
For now, though, I give his question the weight it deserves.
“I intend to share knowledge which I have from my own people, hopefully making the village stronger and more successful. I intend to try to make the village more egalitarian, recognising that even the physically and magically weaker may offer more to the village than what resources they can gather. In short, I am going to change many things about your way of life, but I intend it for the better.”
And if they do not ultimately improve my village? he rumbles. I shrug.
“Then we find things which will work better.”
I feel him searching through my aura, probably testing my sincerity and maybe something else. After a moment, his intensity fades.
Very well. I give myself, and with it, my village into your hands.
Considering he has little choice – I have beaten him in the physical fight and could easily force the issue now – it could be construed as something a little arrogant or pompous. However, I’m touching him soul to soul and I feel the weight of what he is giving me – his trust. I feel just how hard it is for him to give it to an outsider, one who is not even the same species. One who has already harmed those under his care. Yet, for the benefit of his village, he gives it nonetheless, if only tentatively for now.
“Thank you,” I say in the end, my tone serious, my emotions sincere and appreciative. Because ultimately, with him on my side, willingly rather than forcibly, I suspect that change will be easier to perpetrate.
Reaching out, I touch him on the bone between his eyes and the Bond weaves its way into place as the space shatters around us.
Some time has gone past and so Shrieks-loudly already has the herbalist at his side, fussing a little over him. She turns to me with ire colouring her spikes a deep crimson.
“You couldn’t have won in any other way? Shrieks-loudly will be crippled for life! Our strongest Warrior, useless to us!”
That’s all she can think about? His use? I find my lips drawing back from my teeth in a gesture I’ve probably picked up unconsciously from the carnivores in my life.
“No anger on his behalf? Just because he can no longer protect you?”
The herbalist hisses at me, clicking her teeth together, but I don’t let her speak.
“As it happens, you need not worry – I can heal him.” Then, without mincing any more words, I brush the slighter Pathwalker aside, making her stumble away, and crouch down next to Shrieks-loudly. Putting my hand near the wound I caused, I close my eyes and send my mind into his body, trusting in my Bound to keep me safe. For this kind of wound, I definitely need to dedicate my full attention to healing it.
Slowly, and probably unintentionally painfully, I use Flesh-Shaping to first reform the bone arrow so that it no longer has a spike sticking straight into the spinal column, and then to heal the damaged tissue and replenish the fluid around it, making sure to remove any foreign bodies that could cause issues.
It’s difficult, painstaking work, and I’m worried about making a mistake. I might have sounded very confident when telling Shrieks-loudly and the herbalist that I can fix it, but the reality of the situation is that I’m aware of how even the slightest error could cause the Warrior to be paralysed for the rest of his life. Or, even if not completely paralysed, cause enduring stiffness and weakness in his lower half.
However, as I work, I realise that there’s something helping me, something which I realise has been helping me for a while. I had thought that my ease with healing my Bound came from familiarity with their bodies. That probably is true to a certain extent, but I realise as I’m doing this that there’s something more to it.
Shrieks-loudly’s body is actually helping me to heal itself.
It’s like the body has some memory of how it should be, and as long as I don’t force my own vision to take over, but instead merely gently nudge it and provide the magic, the body itself heals with far greater accuracy than I probably would be capable of. Like the body has some sort of code within it which determines how it should all look like.
It’s like I’m hit by an epiphany.
Of course the body knows exactly how all of it should look. It’s not like the body has a code – it actually does.
DNA – the chemical code within every single cell of my body and, presumably, those of all my Bound which tells the body exactly how to create and maintain itself. Could my Flesh-Shaping be tapping into that?
If so…well, making changes on the DNA level could go very well, or very badly. On a less mad-scientist front, it could potentially supercharge my healing: I could arguably bring my Bound pretty much back from the dead as long as whatever spark it is which determines if someone is alive or not is intact.
Though, if it was a genetic defect, things like Catch’s eyesight may not have been healable by using his DNA as a template. I need to remember that not all DNA is perfect – and that following the DNA ‘blueprint’ is not the only thing my Flesh-Shaping can do.
I push the possibilities to the back of my mind and concentrate on healing my newest Bound’s spine so that he is no longer paralysed. Once I’ve done that, I send my mind through the rest of his body and take a moment to heal some injuries to his legs – including the damage to the knee that Catch got in – and a nasty scar on his arm which is currently reducing his mobility in that arm slightly.
Pulling out of my trance, I’m immediately aware of the nagging sense of a notification. Anticipation runs through me, but my curiosity will have to wait to be satisfied – the group of samurans currently looking at me with a range of expressions need to be dealt with first.